If I could choose Adam's name all over again, I would name him Blunt Force Trauma. In the middle of everything, he interrupts me. He does it repeatedly and viscerally, like he can remind me of where I came from by beating me to death with the bricks of the house we grew up in, caving into smeared tissue the places in my brain which forgot him.
"I'm not a careful man, Evelyn," he reminds me, removing his glasses and folding them into the breast pocket of his shirt with fingers so many people seem to forget are roughly calloused, even me. He plays a professor very well, it's true. He dons without effort the mantle of soft collegiate intellectual, but when it comes to any of the Gray boys, all their efforts at civilizing stop at the hands, each pair battered and scarred like teenage warlords. I've written too much about each of their hands, and the secrets they betray of how these boys have grown consequently into men who fight, who vandalize, who commit murder, break down doors, and crash cars.
And so he crashes one into me, when he interrupts me to say, "Come home, Evelyn."
I can never remember what I was doing before. So all statements of will turn into magic spells.
The lights in Adam's room are low, his door partially ajar. I close it when I enter. His curio cabinets glow with exhibition lighting cast over deformed animal bones and antique tattoo guns. I resist his interruptions like I resist anything else I think will affect me inside, and I enter his room a nonchalant boy, immune to charms and dense to nuance.
"I forgot I was going to bring you another penis cage I found," I tell him, diminishing his deep reverence to the history of human sexuality with a fast kick to his sandcastle.
"Goody," he dismisses, because he knows both the mood I'm in and the boy it engenders.
Adam has been clean-shaven and crew-cut since Brad has abandoned the notion of grooming over a year ago. While Brad wilted, Adam starched. Because if he can't give me what I want, he can provide for me it's contrast, and does so with adept innuendo and crisp accuracy.
"Your new deodorant has an almost mildew scent," he adds, "which I enjoy quite a bit."
"That's disgusting," I snap as I cross to the wardrobe where he's relegated my clothes.
"No, it's very pleasant. Like all the leaves of you, have fallen for the year."
Inside the wardrobe, there are t-shirts and jeans on one side, dresses on the other, sweaters in the middle. Adam's arranged my clothes by gender and preference, with items of safety in between. The gesture dissolves my resentment toward him in an instant - the manner in which he understands.
The first night we had sex, I wore my favorite white dress to see him, which ended the night discarded on the floor. Since then, I've seen it haunting the corners of his closets; a secret I've been determined to let him keep. It was a year ago or so when I found it in the lab, a 6-inch square excised from it near the hem. The straps of it peer out from the back of the wardrobe, shrugging their wooden hanger.
I put on a shirt I found on the boy side, faded black and waving the flag of torn pocket over the breast, and we went to bed together. He was gone when I woke up, but I resolved to repay him with the trespass of rearranging his closet similarly, in a way he'd like but never consider himself: by the texture of the clothing.
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